There’s good reason for this. Ryan’s speech was riddled with inaccuracies, misleading statements and distortions of his record in the House of Representatives. In the spirit of what some others have already done, let’s examine the five most mindboggling.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008.

“Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

“And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.

“You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.”

What actually happened:

Paul Ryan’s budget keeps the billions of dollars of cuts in Obamacare — the only part of the health-care law he doesn’t want to repeal. Obama cut $716 billion from Medicare, but there is little in “cuts” to beneficiaries. The cuts come largely from how much the program pays to providers.

3. The S&P credit rating downgrade
Ryan blamed Obama for the S&P’s downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. Here’s a full breakdown of the issue, which is particularly strange because the S&P blamed House Republicans for the downgrade because they were not open to any new measures that would raise revenue.

4. The debt commission
What Ryan said:

Yet by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined. One president, one term, $5 trillion in new debt.

He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

“The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal. […]

“We have responsibilities, one to another – we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.“

What actually happened:

Four times, Paul Ryan and his office requested stimulus money from the Obama administration for his district. He got that stimulus money.

As for his overall theme of “protecting the weak” — which goes along with how ordinary people were “shafted” by the stimulus and the Obama administration’s policies — the centre on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 62 per cent of Ryan’s budget cut low-income programs. That includes $2.4 trillion in cuts to Medicare and $134 billion in food-stamp program cuts.